Comment by the__alchemist

Comment by the__alchemist 10 months ago

An (agarose?) gel.

There are partial holes in at at one end. You insert a small amount of dyed DNA (etc) containing solution each. Apply an electrical potential across the gel. DNA gradually moves along. Smaller DNA fragments move faster. So, at a given time, you can coarsely measure fragment size of a given sample. Your absolute scale is given by "standards", aka "ladders" that have samples of multiple, known sizes.

The paper authors cheated (allegedly) by copy + pasting images of the gel. This is what was caught, so it implies they may have made up some or all results in this and other papers.

shpongled 10 months ago

Close - this is a SDS-PAGE gel, and you run it using proteins. The bands in the first two rows are from a western blot (gel is transferred to a membrane), where you use antibodies against those specific proteins to detect them. The Pon S row is Ponceau S, a dye that non-specifically detects all proteins - so it's used as a loading control, to make sure that the same amount of total protein is loaded in each lane of the gel.

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doctorpangloss 10 months ago

Is it conceivable that the control was run once because the key result came from the same run? I can see a reviewer asking for it in all three figures, whereas they may drafted it only in one

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- gus_massa 10 months ago
  
  The horizontal label is fine, it says Pon S in all images. (I guess a wrong label would be obvious to detect for specialists.)
  The problem are the vertical labels
  In Figure 1e it says: "MT1+2", "MT2" and "MT1"
  In Figure 3a it says: "5'-CR1", "CR2" and "3'-UTR"
  In Figure 3b it says: "CR2", "CR3" and "CR4"
  
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- shpongled 10 months ago
  
  Based on the images, it is inconceivable that these are from the same run (see the dramatically different levels of TRF-S in each gel. One column/lane = one sample). This isn't something that would be included because of a reviewer - loading controls are required to meaningfully interpret the results (e.g. the data is useless without such a control).
  
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NotAnOtter 10 months ago

Additional context to be speculative of OP's intentions. Within the academic world there was a major scandal where a semi-famous researcher was exposed for faking decades of data (Google: Pruitt). Every since, people have been hungry for more drama of the same shape.